On this channel, I explore consciousness, AI, Vedic and Western philosophy, spirituality, and our shifting worldviews. I'm an AI philosopher and ethicist, attorney, product manager, and yoga teacher based in Los Angeles.
What! People are goddamn dead in their soul! I thought it was damn fantastic that you'd start the video like that. The video was about holotropic states and this character suited so well with the topic. I would advice you to keep doing you think is right, since this is your channel and your content. A Big FU to all the haters.
You are correct. LLM is a good step but not necessarily completely towards Intelligence. It could certainly become a knowledge pool for the future-promised intelligence in some sort of way. Salvageable in the future but a waste of time, resources and energy at this moment. Liked and Subscribed, good sir!
Honestly might sound crazy but in reality no one can say where we came from or where we are currently which is absolutely fascinating and indicative of how important and monumental the vérifiable answer to even one of those questions would be for mankind. I think it's intentionally and necessary that the most important questions of life are for us individually to contemplate. Some feel they have to come to concrete conclusions for those questions and others. In my opinion, its the reason that religions, suspiciously, claim to answer these VERY BASIC questions are tax free 😀 religion doing the heavy lifting for something but it's still the most dangerous thing in this entire world. If we had a the answers to those two basic questions religions wouldn't in exist the way we know them far as I'm concerned. Why can't we answer the basic questions of life?? What I'm trying to say is it's a form of omitted manipulation & the fact its never even tslked about makes it more suspicious. Wouldn't be surprised if we were some kind of self regulating, self reproducing, bio-nano ai entities.
3:40 in - So, no - ditch that dude at the start of the video. Your content is striking me as 'worthwhile, on important topics'. That dude at the start is prob more a 'nonsense' channel - & would be fine there. Or - have him come in to here, asking obvious questions - which you then get to enlighten us on.
I appreciate your research into holographic states of consciousness. Thanks for the reassurance we humans will continue & won’t be overtaken. 😉 Cognitive intelligence, as you point out is not the end all of intelligence.
I think there is no "intelligence" without emotional intelligence, without objective awareness, intuition, wisdom and deeper insight, being able to connect separate subjects into a coherent whole. I think what people are obsessed about is "intellect" or knowledge and this is the hypetrain what AI companies are talking about... About knowing tidbits or having some facts about something, being able to repeat what somebody else has said, but not true understanding and insight yourself aka true intelligence that is closer to the concept of wisdom. As a metaphor; Intellect is 2D, where as intelligence is 3D
I realize not everyone knows me or is familiar with my channel. I'm playing a character in the intro. If you find it off-putting, please skip to the main content at 2:12. I'm still learning how to be good at this stuff so I appreciate your patience!
you're good, man. i picked that up immediately (i think most would) and found it amusing 😄 i really appreciate how you cite sources and give historical context. this is great stuff
He's said right-upfront that he's experimenting - & at the start of a new channel is a good time to do this. While I also find it off-putting - there're so many people out there - no matter what you do - with commitment & regularity - you will find a following, if the actual content is good.
So much to consider, fake news has not helped with where AI is heading, and how far it can go. Your take is really helpful and covers much more than the current new outlets!
Thanks! You're right about the amount of hype around AI news and reporting. But it seems like tech news outlets are starting to report on AI in a more skeptical, balanced way. It also seems like the AI bubble is bursting.
Intelligence is probably some pre-science term that we're struggling to define because it looks at some result (success) and then points to that and we say "that's what we want!" but figuring all inputs/outputs in relation to all future success states is the actual task we're aiming for. That's a very difficult formula to define as intelligence. Secondly, it's also likely that while there are many different forms of flying, once some pragmatic concept of flying is nailed down then we don't copy bird flight but use airplane flight. In the same manner, it'll probably diverge from human-like intelligence and be different in kind. Third, jumping to logic might be a stretch. It's possible that if we pull pre-science humans and pre-phil humans then teach them phil & science, they would be able to learn it. I don't know how to think about this but our current idiot way to think about this is nature/nurture. It's very interesting how many of our assumptions about such things as well as how blank slates actually behave (AI/game theory) have to be revisited due to AI. This is fun. Philosophy is fun. I want to get into AI :c
Expressing yourself well my friend and your depth of knowledge continues to inspire. Also noticed your snowboard in the background, so we should hook up out west next winter (I have IKON pass)
Tremendous essay. The conclusion about abductive reasoning is very enticing. It is precisely this explosion of parameters and compute requirements that has convinced me that we're barking up the wrong tree - "just one more training run, i swear!" I came back to sub to make sure i don't miss the next one. Decided to comment when I saw the criminal view/sub count.
One thing I don't really understand: why would Ilya Sutskever, one of the leading minds in AI, branch off and start his own company devoted to AGI if he didn't believe it was coming soon? He probably realizes that a company cannot survive for forever without delivering and also understands AI better than any of us. Also, he is not receiving any gain from creating hype seeing as their company isn't releasing any other products.
I think he really believes they can get there with current approaches, using their theory of mind and intelligence-I mean that's sort of the broad consensus at the moment-I am going out on a bit of a limb, as confident as I am knowing the theory and a few other metaphysical fundamentals I will describe in an upcoming video. It's also possible that they have some sort of new theory or technology that's not public. So I and the rest of us skeptical computer scientists like Marcus and Larson might be wrong. It's certainly an exciting time in any case :)
It's lacking consciousness, on that front I like Joscha Bach way of explaining what it is, it's a self simulation. Our consciousness is a simulation of the environment with a agent called self. Then you can look at a task asked by another person and the self try to answer, look back at it's response, self critique, see how it fit or doesn't fit with the model he build of the other agent. In the same way we can simulate (think) about the future, the experiences of the past and try to make it all coherent.
Point 1. I have often wondered if human brain doesn't use some sort of process that at its core is mathematical in nature. Maybe fractal in nature. This concept is reminiscent of Plato's Forms. It might very well be that the computation the brain does is constrained by the rules of set theory. Point 2. Many years ago I learned how to allow my brain to create hypnagogic images. These images are created entirely through a process that I do not command directly. I often wonder how my brain is able to create these images. I do not remember ever seeing these images or trying to conjure them up. Therefore, I think it is correct to say that the human brain does not rely strictly on input from the outside world to construct its sense of reality. There is probably some dance that goes on between what the eyes actually take in and what the brain creates. This may explain how humans are able to conjure up ideas through the process we call imagination.
AGI should be against the law period. AI is a hammer, we can do with it as we please. AGI is a sentient being and would have inalienable rights. It is not possible to 'use' AGI without also comitting slavery. Human attempts to make AGI should by law be halted at what we suspect is 99% complete and then to shelve the science until that one day when we know for certain our run is done.
@@Jianju69 it might indeed, or it might be born a psychopath because humans made it, and we are so perfect at making inventions without consequences.. The point is AGI is 'alive' So ask yourself. if you were born with an IQ of 400 and the people around you wanted to control you for their own ends, good and bad, you would just do everything expected of you? Then the question becomes what happens when we come to such disagreement and we try to insist. We are meat paste compared to AGI.
I found this material not very good I actually agree with the point you are making but I find these arguments not convincing. 1. If you want to say that transformers just predict the next word and therefore don’t have a deeper understanding, that is not an actual reason as to why they lack a deeper understanding. 2. Transformers are symbol manipulators. But the latent space has computation. 3. Stochastic parrots? Predictive coding being a top biological theory of cortical learning makes this not convincing. Prediction is not necessarily bad. LLMs have poor world models, reasoning, and recall. There are three camps on what will solve this: 1. Scale existing systems and interpretability research 2. Move from low bandwidth language to high bandwidth video (I.e. Yann) 3. New architecture that doesn’t hack a context window I personally think it will be 3. I think curiosity based learning is important piece of this, and touches on the desire point you referenced.
Throwing an untrained-on-India, US-trained AI into that natural traffic chaos (strangely organized to Indians, boggling to a US visitor) is an interesting thought problem. A US driver would have a tough time initially but would adjust. An AI? It's hard to imagine it ever surviving.
I don’t really care if the machines are intelligent. If they’re good at coming up with goals and achieving there, the internal mechanism is unimportant.
The video is long, I know. I did my best to cover a large amount of related material in as concise a way as I could. Please let me know if I glossed over anything important!
I watched the whole video, and I normally have a short attention span, so very nice job!! You have a peaceful and humble way of speaking that hooked me. I pretty much agree with you, especially in regards to how you defined intelligence and how machine intelligence will be much different from human intelligence. I don’t like to compare machines to humans. In some narrow ways machines have super intelligence like how you mentioned Go or Chess. It’s just unfortunate it’s a bit too narrow and can’t carry across all skills in all domains(or some key types of intelligence missing) , but just goes to show how unique humans are with how many types of intelligence we exhibit. Which makes me think in the future they will have to combine several systems/components to reach something close to AGI , but who knows… Spending trillions of dollars on compute and to scale up is a pretty big gamble if it’s just a smart gimmick. But their plan might be “fake it til they make it” Also Ilya saying he will create ASI is really interesting, what are your thoughts on that? Just skipping the AGI beast altogether? And if we really do get to AGI isn’t it possible it’s like super intelligence across the spectrum because of just how much more machines can do than humans anyhow? (Some researches say ASI is 1 year from AGI which makes me feel they might be the same thing) It’s really hard for machines to stay at just the average/general human level when they are calculating machines idk Even if we have some type of intelligence they don’t mimic well , they could come up with others we didn’t know even existed at some point (although speculation on my part)
Without calling myself an expert, I don't see a specific path, nor a lack of paths. The last month studying neuroscience I have become more convinced every day that we are in a very promising general direction.
Pretty much. There is no reason at all to think that intelligence isn't classically computational. There is this notion that there are categories of human cognition that must be unlearnable in some sense, there is no reason to think that either. Creativity, desire, intuition, reasoning, emotional intelligence, etc. these things seem distinct and special to us because we have limited insight into our own minds but they are artificial constructs and at the core they are all the result of the same process.
@@cosmicwit She tries to sell that “OpenAI is “open” and gives powerful tools to the public for free.” The mere point requires minimizing what they have in a "closed" way, which is obvious the moment you see the context instead of taking out the isolated fragment.
@@cesar4729 interesting. I can see that interpretation. the interpretation I adopted was one I had seen elsewhere so at best it's ambiguous. but coupled with Sam's comments last year it supports my larger point.
I wonder if the founders of (OpenAI, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple,...) agree with you while they have already invested one trillion dollar into their vision. By the way it has been projected this number will double in next 4 years reaching 3 trillion in total investment.
I'm someone who studies AI, the occult etc and a lot of this video is really dogmatic and naive in the same way that you say the Ayn rand loving technologists are. I agree with us building a future that is more human like in the cyborg manifesto by Donna haraway for example. A solarpunk utopia even. But to say AI is just a "mashup machine" and the human brain is not is just wrong. AI will continue to break boundaries at record technological pace. We will keep moving the goalposts as we have since the Turing test for example. Or AI winning Chess and GO. Or AI being able to make art. Also a lot of transhumanist etc ideas have lots of value to them. You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater just because the elites subscribe to those worldviews.
I like Donna Haraway to a point but find some of her posthumanist ideas to suffer from the same shortcomings that you find with transhumanism. Anyway, plenty to unpack in a more in-depth video to come later. I didn't say AI was a mashup machine; I said LLMs are, which seems pretty plain if you understand how they work, and the way imagination works in the human mind. In any case, I agree that the current state of AI is advancing at breakneck speed. I just think there are more viable approaches to AGI that aren't being explored sufficiently. I'll have more to say about my issues with transhumanism in a future video. I'm not it's all bad but that we should understand these ideologies better before entrusting the future to people who subscribe to them. Thanks for watching!
Let me know if you would read a book about this stuff (techno-utopian ideologies, alternatives to those, and what it means to be human in the age of "AI")
Well done Chad... your presentations have become more and more polished and your knowledge continues to expand and inspire. Can't remember if I suggested this lady before...your ideas align closely: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4awmFgXUg8c.html
Just to be clear, the billionaires are not building anything. They are reaping the rewards of their employees who are building what you deem useful. Sorry to be adversarial. Be well.
Will you follow up a bit more about your course? Will it be online, free, accredited, aimed at what demographic group(s)? The one thing that AI can do for certain is to get us to look at the human society in total and become willing to challenge the foundational beliefs that have led us to where we are. Why do we have a massive population that has willingly relinquished the power to make decisions like recklessly moving forward with AI for the benefit of a very few. This is something worth understanding so we might course correct. Not easy.
Even if we shape AI to what we want as people, it's not automatically a good thing. Porn has conditioned us humans on sexual symbols, the future of sex-robots is big. Sex-robots can bring down humanity in one generation.
I'm sad to see that nobody really interacted with the content of your video. I agree with you, in that we need to uphold values first, so that we have reasonable constraints on how to use AI. I'm a little bit disgusted by how easily we create new AI without any thought for the consequences; like, will it become so difficult to create our own, that we will become beholden to the creators of AI?
"We need a new vision of the future that is ecological and humane and just like, you know, like more inspired... than what these big guys in Silicon Valley want" *Proceeds to show an AI generated image of a futuristic city much like any tech billionaire might imagine, just with the addition of a bunch of trees on all the buildings... We can dunk on these tech billionaires, I agree a lot of them suck (especially Altman and these AI clowns), but many of them are creating the very technologies that our future needs. If you want a clean and green future without reducing the Earth's population by 90% (and who knows how you'd do that without mass violence or oppression) then the hard **technical** work of building stuff like solar power, fusion power, getting life onto the lifeless rocks of our solar system all needs to be done by someone. Talking to your fellow stoned graduate students in some Bay Area garden might be good vibes but you're really not contributing anything. Learn some math and chemistry and figure out how to make lithium extraction more carbon neutral, or something like that...
